To Tell The Truth In a few days I’ll send out the email book-launch announcement about my book, Victory Is My Name, a Memoir. The introduction says, “This  book will not be everybody's cup of tea.” Everyone who loves to read has a favorite flavor and brew. Maybe it's romance novels with passion, sex, and reliable happy endings. Or Sci-Fi, that transports us to another place with different possibilities than this messed-up world we’ve let build up around us here on planet Earth. Or detective mysteries– I do love British period-mysteries like Agatha Christie's Inspector Poirot. I enjoy trying to guess who-done-it, knowing that the odd little man will always figure it out. For others, maybe it’s “Thrillers." They sell like hotcakes. Or murder tales of Blood and guts galore. (No thanks, not my cup of tea.) This book is not about any of that. Not a beach-book, not a tell-all, not entertainment. This story, at risk of failing to win the approval of a great many readers, is about telling the truth. It's about making mistakes, and doing the best you can with what you get. Life is not an even playing field. It's not always fair. But my granny told me "Life never gives us more than we can bear" and because I was innocent enough to believe that, in my life ahead, I did do more than anyone else thought possible. It must be said that every novel carries some essential truths at its core, but memoir is the only genre that is obligated, expected, and pledged, to tell the truth. I don't write fiction, mostly because I have never needed to. Real life is constantly exploding with stories to be told and shared. We all, as human beings, learn about life, in the long run, from life. Our own and each other’s. But these are the true stories about real life that we, as a social species, are usually constrained not to tell. But I say, Why not tell the truth? You can't please everybody anyway. Trust me, I tried for the first 26 years of my life. It never worked. I did that while trying to hide and protect myself, so people wouldn't hurt me. They hurt me anyway. (But that's another story… Fair warning: If you read my book, you may at times be offended, annoyed, even angry with the storyteller/protagonists/myself, for being so naive, and so stupid. Or you might cry real tears when she makes the same mistakes you did. But you will likely also be inspired some too, and heartened by her courage, and her large and small victories that defied the odds and prove in the end a truth beyond dispute: girls can. In the last decade or so, memoir has become recognized as a serious literary genre that can take many different creative forms. Since books like Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, authentic well-written memoirs are drawing a new crowd of readers who are willing and even hungry for the truth. Like myself, Author McCourt became a writer late in life. He wrote a different kind of memoir, and when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, he said, “All I had was this story. It took me two years and all my life to write it.” I understand exactly what he meant. I believe the world is ready for truth, and tragically acutely in need of it. We are in the grip of a humanity-wide need for a different choice from the lies we are drowning in now. Humanity is getting many urgent wake up calls from the techno-sleep we have fallen into. A clear un-distorted, un-photo-shopped window to actual reality, and real life, must open. Many of us, like lemmings that have already gone off the cliff, are swimming in an ocean of confusion, longing for something we can believe in. Most of us have a disturbingly deep need to get our feet on the ground again, like back in the day when ethics were clear, we knew what mattered, and we knew what was what. We were introduced into what life was supposed to be by real live people, parents, or early schoolteachers. Now most children of the last generation were socialized by the ethics of video murder-games, six or more hours a day, starting a age five. And we are seeing the harvest of that on the Breaking News. These are tomorrow's leaders. And some of them, we can dare to hope, are today's readers. I was fortunate to grow up in the 50's, when things were simpler, and Presidents, businesses, and ordinary people had values and decency. The old days are gone. We need to start where we are, and meet each other honestly for the first time. Tell the truth about what life is, and how it matters. That’s what Victory is about.